Courtesy Hightstown High SchoolJenna Marcus is pictured after scoring her 1,000th point with head coach Doug Shunk, right, and assistant coach Sean Meloney.

A seven-win season might not be something worth celebrating for some basketball teams. However, there were many reasons for cake and balloons for Jenna Marcus and the Hightstown High girls’ basketball team.

“We had one win last year, so this was great,” said Marcus, a senior on the 7-18 Rams squad. “We had three different coaches in four years, so for the eight seniors this was a good way to end.”

There was improvement for Marcus and classmates Caroline Noebels, Jaimie McHale, Erin Sobkowiak, Katie Hackett, Vivian Harris, Samantha Santos, and Melissa Arriseno as well as the younger members of the Hightstown program.

Marcus, The Times’ Athlete of the Week, hit the highest height of this Hightstown team when she scored her 1,000th career point in the final game of the season.

There was some drama for Marcus who reached the quadruple-digit plateau in the last quarter of her final high school game.

“It was a jump shot that bounced off the top and then finally went in,” said Marcus of the shot midway through the fourth quarter of an 82-43 loss to Woodbridge in a first-round game of the NJSIAA Group III Central tournament.

Marcus finished with 18 points in the game and 1,004 for her career.

“There were flowers (and balloons), the whole team came out,” Marcus said. “It was nice. My whole family came to the game.”

One member of her family is a part of the girls’ basketball program at Hightstown.

“My younger sister is a freshman, she played a little varsity,” Marcus said of her sibling Jessica. “It was a little weird to play basketball with her, I never actually have before.”
And one member of her family is the reason – she thinks – that prompted Marcus to play basketball.

“I’ve been playing since fourth or fifth grade, I don’t even remember how or why I started,” said the 5-foot-10 student-athlete who also plays soccer and softball. “I played for the CYO team because my dad was a coach.”

Her height was not a deciding factor for the three-sport athlete.

“I was short when I was little,” Marcus said. “I had (at least) one big growth spurt. Starting my freshman year I was almost 5-7 and I grew two or three inches in high school.”

The next varsity basketball coach she’ll likely play for is at William Paterson University.
“I’m pretty sure that I’m going to go to William Paterson to play basketball there,” said Marcus, who plans to pursue a degree and career in speech pathology.

Stockton College also remains a possibility for the “A’s and B’s” student.

She wasn’t sure she’d become the eighth girls’ basketball player to score 1,000 points at Hightstown but it helped her end an up-and-down high school career on a high.

“In the beginning of the season my dad kept telling me it was a goal to aim for,” Marcus said. “Then I had a couple of big games and I thought I might get it. It was close.”
After the sighs of relief came the celebration.